Refulgent -- I Gotta Wear Shades

Mining Simon Mawer's novel The Glass Room for vocabularic gems is proving a most enriching experience. Today, I came across refulgent in this passage describing the the installation of the glass panes forming the eponymous room of the book's title:

It had become a palace of light, light bouncing off the chrome pillars, light refulgent on the walls, light glistening on the dew in the garden, light reverberating from the glass. It was as though they stood inside a crystal of salt.

Refulgent, according to the Kindle's built-in dictionary, means "shining brightly." The OED says a bit more expansively, "shining with, or reflecting, a brilliant light; radiant, resplendent, gleaming."

Mawer uses the term in this instance to describe the effect of the newly erected glass space, or glass room, as the couple for whom this modernistic house is being built experience it for the first time.

But this isn't the first instance Mawer uses the term in the novel. My eyes skipped over the first usage in an earlier passage when pregnant Liesel, the female half of the couple, is submitting to her friend's efforts to divine the gender of her unborn baby via an old wives' trick (the novel is set pre-ultrasound) of suspending her wedding ring by a string over her belly and watching its movements:

'It's a girl.' The turning is obvious now, incontrovertible, a description of a perfect female circle over the smooth and refulgent dome of Liesel's belly.

Nor is it the term's the last usage in the novel. Mawer applies it once more to Liesel in a passage where he describes her as she "now appears fantastic, a shining refulgent creature."

I'm tempted to take issue with the redundancy of shining. However, I'm more intrigued by the parallels that the author seems to be drawing between the woman and the unparalleled and resplendent house she occupies, a unique structure built exclusively for her and her family. I'm not far enough along in the novel to draw conclusions about the relationship between the character of the house and the character of the woman. However, this strikes me as a good example of how authors can suggest deeper meanings even by something as seemingly simple as their word choice.

Glaucous -- Vocabulary from The Glass Room

In between snow shoveling, pounding ice out of the gutter downspouts, and chipping away at ice dams on the roof, I've begun reading Simon Mawer's novel, The Glass Room. It's clearly a book full of vocabulary gems, which I'll make a point to mine along the way. My first fun find: glaucous.

The term means, according to the dictionary in the Kindle on which I'm reading the novel:
1. of a dull grayish-green or blue color.
2. covered with a powdery bloom like that on grapes.

The word's ultimate root is the Greek glaukos meaning "bluish-green" or "bluish-gray." This root is shared by glaucoma, the medical term for a gradual loss of sight due to increased pressure on the eyeball, which can be marked by a gray-green haze in the pupil.

Usage of glaucous in the novel is in reference to a model of a pavilion that the modernist architect Ranier von Abt has designed and is now showing off to his new acquaintances and perhaps potential clients:

The colours of the model were those that von Abt had extolled in their voyage down from Saint Mark's: ethereal white, glaucous pearl, glistening chrome.

It sounds cold but lovely to me.